Occasional Thoughts

I already wrote about my experiences with Jaunty Jackalope on a HP EliteBook 8530w. Now this article is a delta update for Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10).

All in all hardware support is much better now. I did not had to install updated NVidia drivers (and still have no problems at all - even the random artifacts after waking up are gone) nor an updated firmware for WLAN. Even the function keys are partially working.

My mother wanted a simple laptop, which is sufficient for browsing the web, writing some emails and some letters. So I haven chosen a HP Compaq 615 since it has a very low price but does it's job. As I don't want to bother my mother with viruses and I wanted the flexibility to setup a system that just fits her needs, I installed Kubuntu. Therefore the next advantage of the HP Compaq 615 is that it has no Microsoft Tax - it's delivered with DR-DOS only.

Ubuntu is supported very well on this laptop. After some tweaks, I managed to get everything working but some function keys that are not really required.

Some days ago I got my new notebook that replaced my previous HP Compaq 8240: An HP EliteBook 8530w. Of course the first thing I did was to shrink the Windows Vista partition to make room for a fresh Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope installation (32  Bit).

Out of the box hardware support is pretty good - I just had some minor problems that I have sorted out in the meantime.

Just tried to upgrade to Kubuntu Jaunty from Intrepid and recognized that my 3 years old notebook is too old to be worth for ATI to be supported.

Jaunty comes with a new XServer and needs the FGLRX 9.4 drivers from ATI. However ATI stopped support for several older cards as discussed in the Ubuntu Forums. There are even some never cards affected, so in case you wish to upgrade, first make sure that FGLRX 9.4 supports your chipset.

Unfortunately the Open Source radeon driver is - in my case - way too instable to work with. I had complete X server crashes after just a couple of minutes each time I've booted.